Page Against The (Culture) Machine

The Wealth of Networks How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,   Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press New Haven and London, 2006)

It starts off with a nice quote from John Stewart Mill:

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing....Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)  

It sets out the basic argument of the book quite nicely: that humans/audiences are not homogenous and that creativity and collaboration and all the aspects of participatory culture are not only beneficial to us but a

"The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. "-pg 8

But then also throws in some understanding around how the internet also detracts from the power of the crowd in the classic 'Babel argument'. (Ironically this is exactly how i'm feeling about my own attempt to crowd-fund this blog; nobody is listening to me amongst the plethora of other projects!): 

"According to the Babel objection, when everyone can speak, no one can be heard, and we devolve either to a cacophony or to the re-emergence of money as the distinguishing factor between statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity. The second-generation critique was that the Internet is not as decentralized as we thought in the 1990s. The emerging patterns of Internet use show that very few sites capture an exceedingly large amount of attention, and millions of sites go unnoticed. In this world, the Babel objection is perhaps avoided, but only at the expense of the very promise of the Internet as a democratic medium. " (pg9)

So thinking about this in terms of journalism its easy to apply this idea with some clear success. The crowdfunded journalism market is around the 2%-4% of the industry in terms of readership numbers. This shows the idea of the babel argument, i.e that it's lost in a sea of other options. But it also shows that crowdfunded journalism suffers in making itself heard. This book does offer another way of looking at this trend, when thinking about grassroots, or niche market media culture. It looks instead to a 'long tail ' approach of thinking about different 'publics' operating as niche fanbases to be harnessed and adopted by new producers. There is clear evidence that crowdfunded journalism that has had success has also succeeded by using this kind of approach. 

 "The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable. Because of the redundancy of clusters and links, and because many clusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital investment, it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view. These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly." (PG13)

The other arguments laid out in the book cover a wide range of implications generally of the networked culture we have produced. As my project focuses on Adorno's ideas around a 'culture industry' wielding its power over consumers there are some attempts at identifying a cultural resistance within contemporary audiences:

 "I suggest that the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, and (2) it makes culture more malleable. Together, these mean that we are seeing the emergence of a new folk culture—a practice that has been largely suppressed in the industrial era of cultural production—where many more of us participate actively in making cultural moves and finding meaning in the world around us." (pg 15)

Personally, I'm not sure we can class crowdfunded journalism as 'folk culture' but it certainly has grown organically from similar roots. If Gramsci and Adorno decried the ideological impact and strength of the major cultural creators then transparency and malleability are surely words and ideals that we should strive for to help us counteract the perceived domination.

Benkler moves his argument at times even to express the powerless nature of 'culture' in general. Clearly juxtaposing his work from that of the Frankfurt school. I would ask the question though; If culture is indeed merely a framework of indeterminate nature that we negotiate with and freely engage with then why do I, and the 5.4 million others, still have to watch Strictly come dancing on tv each Saturday night? Or.. why is big media still in existence and why have we had 7 titles in the fast and furious series?!

"Culture, in this framework, is not destiny. It does not predetermine who we are, or what we can become or do, nor is it a fixed artifact. It is the product of a dynamic process of engagement among those who make up a culture. It is a frame of meaning from within which we must inevitably function and speak to each other, and whose terms, constraints, and affordances we always negotiate. There is no point outside of culture from which to do otherwise ."(pg281)